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New York Press Gets Rid of Sex Ads

By Sewell Chan August 6, 2007 4:22 pmAugust 6, 2007 4:22 pm

The new owners of New York Press, the free alternative weekly founded in 1988, announced a major change today, and it has nothing to do with the paper’s political coverage, underground sensibility or arts listings. The scrappy weekly is dropping its sexually themed ads.
The banned ads include those “that advertise illegal massage parlors and blatant ads promoting prostitution,” the local chapter of the National Organization for Women announced today. (The New York Observer’s Media Mob blog reported the decision last week.)

Last week, Manhattan Media — which owns a chain of community weeklies, including The Chelsea Clinton News, founded in 1939; Our Town, founded in 1970; The Westsider, founded in 1972; and The West Side Spirit, founded in 1985 — announced that it bought The Press from a private equity group.

The group had bought the weekly in 2003 from Russ Smith, the paper’s founder, who continues to write his “Mugger” column for the newspaper. Manhattan Media will merge Our Town Downtown, which it started in 2006, with New York Press.

NOW said that Manhattan media “will initially will take a financial hit by dropping sex ads that have made up a sizable percentage of New York Press sales, but the long-term growth prospects for this widely circulated newspaper dramatically increase as it is remade into a reputable publication.”

Sonia Ossorio, president of the organization’s New York City chapter, praised Tom Allon, the chief executive of Manhattan Media, for the decision. NOW has estimated that New York Press made $12,000 a week from sexually themed ads; the publication has not confirmed that estimate.

NOW believes that ads for massage parlors and similar businesses promote prostitution. “With the increased public awareness of global trafficking of women and girls, including American teenagers, advertisers and readers find newspapers loaded with explicit content and photos of half-naked women just not acceptable,” NOW said in its statement. “Not something they want in their reception room or on the coffee table.”

The NOW local chapter began a campaign last fall to end human trafficking. It has targeted newspapers and magazine that accept ads from massage parlors and asked them to sign an antitrafficking pledge.

The local chapter of NOW was founded in 1966 and says it has 7,000 members locally and 35,000 statewide. The chapter said in a statement:

New York Press, along with the Village Voice, New York Magazine and the Verizon Yellow Pages are the leading publications that serve as the intermediary between “johns” and trafficked people. The Village Voice, a weekly with more than twice the readership of the Press, generates an average of $80,000 per month from the adult ads on its back pages, New York Magazine generates about $40,000 a month and the Verizon Yellow Pages generates more than $1 million a year.

The Village Voice has not responded to a message left with a spokeswoman. A Verizon spokeswoman said its SuperPages advertising was now handled by a company called Idearc. A message has been left with that company.

Serena Torrey, a spokeswoman for New York magazine, said in a statement, “If ever the authorities bring evidence of illegal activity behind any of our ads to our attention, we will take immediate action to remove the ad — and the advertiser — from our magazine permanently.”

It is utterly ridiculous that we are so concerned about consenting adults who are in the sex business. People will always buy and sell sex. It should be legal. We waste so much money on wars that kill people and financing the police to hunt down escorts and pot smokers so the police can make overtime which costs the taxpayers about $250 for the overtime not to mention $3000 per arrest total cost. What a waste of money. If they must keep it illegal they should be issued something similiar to a parking ticket and given a fine rather than arrest them.

New York magazine is purposely being naive, eh? Or maybe none of their staffers are New Yorkers. Here’s a story for them: have a reporter road test the services who advertise with them and see what happens.

Is is truly ridiculous to prosecute consenting adults for something like this. Most other western countries have come around to this view quite a long time ago.

Besides food and shelter, there are few things more beneficial than release of sexual tension. It completely makes no sense at all to ban something which can benefit people and make society as a whole healthier and happier.

Why do our laws attempt to dictate that it is acceptable to massage certain parts of the human body but not others?

Regarding comment #2, I remember “My Weekly Reader” from elementary school. It’s quite surprising to learn that they featured sexually themed ads until a year ago! My goodness, what is the world coming to?

New York Magazine to Drop Sex Ads:
November 8th Protest Cancelled
New York Magazine has decided to eliminate its “adult” advertisements and to work with NOW-NYC to fight human trafficking in the coming year. This is great news for the magazine, women and the movement to bring an end to human trafficking in our city. We applaud the leadership of New York Magazine, and we look forward to celebrating this progress in the very near future with you.

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